I don’t know the story behind these images at all, but they certainly say more than their allotted 1,000 words! The creators of these pictures of free range workers say only that they wanted to illustrate the commonality between office working conditions and the way chickens are raised (i.e. in cage batteries vs. free-range). Of course, no matter how chickens are raised, no matter how happy or unhappy they are on their farms, their ultimate end isn’t all that pleasing for the chicken (I imagine — I’ve never asked a dead chicken how they felt about it all). [Continue reading]

This post is a response to the increasingly heated thread at Feministe on Female Genital Cutting (FGC). Nearly every mention of FGC in our society elicits condemnation of the practices and the people who practice them as “bestial”, “barbarian”, “inhuman”, “uncivilized”, “heinous”, etc., which has a tendency to set me off. For a long time I’ve wondered about the incredible and disproportional response FGC incites in Westerners, feminists and non-feminists alike, responses which generally are very far removed from the reported responses and experiences of women who have undergone some form of FGC.

Money quote: “Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood. It embraced home video in the late 1970s, allowing people to bypass seedy theaters and watch the movies in their living rooms. Mainstream studios, by contrast, fought home video all the way to the Supreme Court before making it one of the most profitable pieces of their business.”

Arwan at Pandagon describes herself as pro-sex, anti-porn, opening up a discussion on the boundaries of pornography and how individuals interact with (or choose not to) those boundaries. I left a long comment responding to two of the commentors’ posts, both of which concerned me for their projection of assumptions about the nature of porn onto those who produce and consume it. The comment is in the moderation queue, and I don’t know how that works over there, so I figured I’d post it here (plus, I make some points I want to come back to someday, and this site is for storing ideas I want to come back to someday):

Bitch|Lab’s post on how the current argument about whether feminism or technology have done more to free women from the “drudgery” of housework ignores dimensions of race and class as well as the historic construction of notions of cleanliness and morality brought to mind an essay I wrote long ago. At the turn of the 20th century, middle-class women engaged in what was essentially a missionary effort directed towards poor immigrants, establishing “settlements” in poverty-stricken areas like the Lower East Side and offering instruction on diet, hygiene, and good citizenship, all with a healthy dose of moralizing.

Emily Jenkins in Salon writes on sexual moderates, people who like sex just fine but don’t obsess over it, don’t feel the need to define every aspect of their lives in relation to sex — and the way our culture marginalizes what is probably a pretty normal attitude about sex as weird, dysfunctional, frigid, etc.:

One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact.